Dying to remember, remembering to survive: Mortality salience and survival processing

Abstract

Processing items for their relevance to survival improves recall for those items relative to numerous other deep processing encoding techniques. Perhaps related, placing individuals in a mortality salient state has also been shown to enhance retention of items encoded after the morality salience manipulation (e.g., in a pleasantness rating task), a phenomenon we dubbed the "dying-to-remember" (DTR) effect. The experiments reported here further explored the effect and tested the possibility that the DTR effect is related to survival processing. Experiment 1 replicated the effect using different encoding tasks, demonstrating that the effect is not dependent on the pleasantness task. In Experiment 2 the DTR effect was associated with increases in item-specific processing, not relational processing, according to several indices. Experiment 3 replicated the main results of Experiment 2, and tested the effects of mortality salience and survival processing within the same experiment. The DTR effect and its associated difference in item-specific processing were completely eliminated when the encoding task required survival processing. These results are consistent with the interpretation that the mechanisms responsible for survival processing and DTR effects are overlapping.

Dying scenarios improve recall as much as survival scenarios

“…We suggested that such benefits might extend to information processing. Consistent with the idea that MS enhances motivation to process information, we provided some evidence that MS increases cognitive depth and complexity ; see also Burns, Hart, Kramer, & Burns, 2013). Independent raters who coded the written responses to the mortality and control questions found the responses to the mortality questions to be more complex, deep, meaningful, and sophisticated.…”

“…Although our subsequent findings (Burns et al, 2013) were consistent with a functional connection, our studies did not go so far as to match the mortality and survival manipulations on key factors, making them difficult to compare directly. Klein sought to resolve this by comparing the effects of a dying scenario to those of the survival scenario as well as a pleasantness rating control task.…”

“…However, the existing evidence seems to leave open enough questions that it is premature to conclude that there is no overlap at all between the DTR and survival processing effects. Indeed, some evidence already seems to point toward the possibility of some degree of overlap (Bell et al, 2013, Experiment 3;Burns et al, 2013).…”

“…Our subsequent research focusing on possible connections between survival processing and the DTR effect (Burns et al, 2013) suggested that, although the two phenomena are probably not isomorphic, they may share some underpinnings. For example, we reasoned that if the two effects share similar proximate causes, then the effects of MS and survival processing on retention should be redundant.…”

A meta-analysis of the survival-processing advantage in memory

“…Burns, Hart, Kramer, and Burns (2014) considered the "dying-to-remember" (DTR) effect, where participants are placed in a mortality salient state, and tested if the DTR effect was related to survival processing. Burns et al found an association with the DTR effect and an increase in item-specific processing.…”